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| Personal background |
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People give me truly blank stares when I tell them that my car is looking for extraterrestrials. I'm an army brat / preachers kid, born in Lawton, OK in '51. Lived in D.C., Elizabeth City, NC, Knoxville, TN, Tuskegee, AL, and now Lithonia, GA. Crazy about computers, running SETI on 6 computers in my home including one each in my car and truck. Computers have been my life since 1977 but now my time is spent with LiftHitch.Com, a device that carries a motorcycle on the bumper of a SUV or truck as conveniently as a bicycle on the bumper of a compact car.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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As a scientist I must admit that statistics are highly in favor of there being extraterrestrial life. As a realist I must also admit that I think it highly unlikely that we will ever hear from them on an interstellar radio signal. The distances are so great that if they start broadcasting today we probably won't hear from them for another five million years because light travels so slowly. On the other hand, if we pick up a radio signal that they sent out 5 million years ago, they would be so advanced by now that they wouldn't want to be bothered with us primatives.
Listening is one thing but I don't like the idea of transmitting anything to an unknown audience. I'd rather know who I'm talking to before revealing anything about our location, technology, genetic sequencing, abundance of water, or our inability to visit them. What would be the point of transmitting to them? Conversation would be impossible. Have you noticed the 5 second delay between local news anchors and their satellite connected foreign correspondents? Multiply that by a million years.
SETI runs in my home and car because I'm highly competitive. Some of the guys in the office were bragging about how many SETI units they had processed and how fast their machines were. I started running SETI on everything in the house, including leaving the 650MHz laptop running 24 by 7. That wasn't enough. I then built a dual Pentium 800MHz which didn't turn out to be that fast because of bus contention even though the two SETI's ran on separate processors. So I built two 1.2GHz Athlons, caught up with the office guys and passed them in three months. Then I went too far and even put a computer in my car, justifying it with mp3 music and GPS navigation. It only has a 500Mhz Pentium IV with 128Mb RAM but it runs SETI whenever it's idle.
Hopefully a day will come that I will get to visit the Arecibo Radio Observatory to make sure it hasn't been taken over by aliens. |
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